Looking through my logs, I see that Google and other spiders waste a lot of bandwidth on the "not authorized" page. It occurred to me that many of these errors could be avoided by creating templates based on permissions.
For example, since guests and spiders aren't allowed (at least on my forum) to add events to the calendar, the add event links should not be shown.
I already have 3 copies of the welcome back block - one each for spider, guest, and member.
Wow that would make it even more complex than vB. Having a template for each group it would take a lot of time just to make an edit for one template. :|
laie_techie Wrote:Looking through my logs, I see that Google and other spiders waste a lot of bandwidth on the "not authorized" page. It occurred to me that many of these errors could be avoided by creating templates based on permissions.
For example, since guests and spiders aren't allowed (at least on my forum) to add events to the calendar, the add event links should not be shown.
I already have 3 copies of the welcome back block - one each for spider, guest, and member.
A simpler solution is to have a "bot" group. Then you could alter permissions for the bots. IMHO this is much needed. At times you want to disallow members to view your forums but that of course causes your pages not to be in SERPs.
I do have a bot group and assigned $botgroup to it in the session class.
The problem arises because spiders are allowed to view the calendar, but not add events. The calendar templates include the add event links. The spider sees this link and follows it to a no permissions page.
Before I introduced the welcome_block_bot template (and altered some code to use it), the bots would see welcome_block_guest which includes links to log in.
That's also why we need conditional statements in the templates.
labrocca Wrote:That's also why we need conditional statements in the templates.
I believe at one point in time that was on the to-do list for a future version.